Intimate Spaces, Homes, Other Thoughts

by Viktor Pivovarov

W.C. Williams: “Though the eye / turns inward, the mind / has spread its embrace—in / a wind that / roughs the stiff petals—”

Dreaming. Daydreaming. Obscurity: My mind often harmoniously quakes at the thought of disappearing, re-appearing, in our own “intimate spaces” “the cosmos” of our physical spaces, the most intimate comfort zones like a house, an apartment; one’s “home.” I think that my photography has a comfort zone of its own, beyond the “audience” “viewer” “voyeur” “escapist” &c. It isn’t necessary for anyone to “understand” my photographs, as long as they are understood by me. (The same can be said for Poetics.) “Meaning” often gets lost amidst the “Act.” Should one attempt to Understand something solely by imagining that one has created it? The reader, as Wallace Stevens once framed, always reads poetry with one’s nerves. How correct he was to state that reading a poem should be an experience, like experiencing an act. Photography can be echoed in the same light. This brings me to the idea of how certain people only go places when something is on one’s mind, but in truth, “we” (the individual) are always at “some place,” whether physically or psychologically, and the daydreamer has no choice. I wrote a poem that is similar; the past, present, future (or the possibility of imagining the future, leaving it open for questioning) that (abstract or not) is a memory where I still ‘reside’ at in my mind, that goes like this:

Your face boiled

like a bright diamond

when we parted

with innocent weeping;

the glow, flaming

to a zenith.

Behind our heads,

each our own golden sky,

as strong as naked rejoicing.

You & I,

the glass of the window;

our Past,

once a sweet & gentle vision

that became our Future,

terrible & invisible,

wolves of our own domains.

And so, between us,

what we all relate:

The Villain of Parting,

nearly unearthly, on one leg

it limped,

do you not remember?

The physical appearance of an Imagination would be either catastrophic or enchanting.

Poems evoke various associations, hence reading a memory. Letters, words, sentences: the invisible spaces upon a page? Our “souls” and “spirits” are invisible. ‘We’ essentially live in a “shell,” which is our Body, which in essence is our “house.” Mary Oliver says that whatever a house is to the heart and a body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit. She concludes, “Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imaginations!” The Physical, our bodies, are the only ‘truths’ of our existence to other human beings. The spirit, which is The Real Person, is invisible (the physical being temporal and the unseen being invisible). In the Hebrew, “house” בַּיִת refers to both the “dwelling habitation,” “shelter or abode of animals,” or an “abode of light and darkness” translates as what we refer to in a Physical sense. The same term, however, applied figuratively as “bodies,” and metaphorically as “inwards” (Inward Dwelling of the Holy Spirit). In Matthew 12:25, Jesus Christ said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or HOUSE divided against itself shall not stand…” If, as Mary Oliver says, our dreams take place inside the houses (more than one, in her view) of our imaginations, then if we, The Real Person (the spirit/soul) lives inside of our “house” (Body), then we, as Invisible Eternal creations, have houses within a house, which could therefore be consolidated down to “rooms.” Each room, our imaginations and memories exist; a combination like that of gail-force winds within the psyche’, dispersed as “floods of thought.” I sit and ‘probe’ the depths of my mind, “going in” as deeply as possible, yet what, if anything, brings forth the first memory that I ‘see’ and recall? The memory, as ungovernable, existing in its own fury. How poised, at times, is the Mind!

Jung used a multi-storied house as an analogy for the human psyche: “We have to describe and to explain a building, the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure.” As Alton Conley notes: “Painted with a broad brush, this image opens our imagination to both the complexities of the human mind and the potentially rich associations of houses.”

In another essay Jung credits a dream, containing an image of a house, with one of his important psychoanalytic discoveries: “One [dream] in particular was important to me, for it led me for the first time to the concept of the collective unconscious . . . This was the dream. I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories. It was my house.” Our houses, in the physical sense, are as Conley again notes, “the protected environments that we dream in, and through our dreams find evidence of ourselves.” Bachelard said that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home,” where the imagination “comfort[s] itself with the illusion of protection.”

In another section from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, this is a perfect example of my own emotions/thoughts about former childhood homes:

“If we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections, bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out the shadow. We do nothing to reorganize it; with intimacy it recovers its entity, in the mellowness and imprecision of the inner life. It is as though something fluid had collected our memories and we ourselves were dissolved in this fluid of the past. Rilke, who experienced this intimacy of fusion, speaks of the fusion of being with the lost house: ‘I never saw this strange dwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, the way it appeared to my child's eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins.’”

The Body σῶμα (“soma”), again, is our “house” that we, as spirit beings, live in. The Physical. In Matthew 6:22, Christ says, “The light of the BODY is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” The eye-gates are important in what we ‘let in’ our bodies, which gets down into the spirit, which produces fruits, depending on what one has allowed to enter one’s eye-gates. The ear-gate has the same effect. Edmond Jabes once said that, at times, an individual is reduced to the ear and the eye, like one sitting in a theater watching a film. Or, “Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.” In a rebuttal, I say that the individual cannot be reduced to the ear and the eye, if one understands that The Real Person is living inside of a body (“house”), therefore to “reduce” an Individual would be to reduce Creation, which therefore would reduce God, the Ultimate Maestro.

*

Barthes: “I may know better a photograph I remember, than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum. Ultimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,' Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.'”

I think that the photographer should have a brain in each eye.

* 

 Deserving looks:

• The Photographic Device as A Waiting Machine
• Angus McBean, History of Art: History of Photography
• French artist, Sophie Ristelhueber,  “uses the medium of photography to study our reality
  

*

I heard the sleet outside of the window, and then a poem came:

Sleet falling, ticking

like a clock

on the crispy leaves.

*

Jean Echenoz: “A bird goes by . . . I follow it. This enables me to go wherever I like in the narrative.”

In a dream, the front door was rotting away (metamorphing/slowly disappearing?). The bottom half was all but gone, save for a few soft spots that clung by a thread. The door was large and had “insides.” I was looking through the door and could see the outside. I felt very worried. Thoughts of locking the door at night came rapidly. Even though the door would be locked at night, someone could easily reach upward and unlock the door, or easily break through and enter. I stood in front of the door, gazing at the door for a long period of time; many thoughts rushing through my head. Worried thoughts. The light on the outside was bright. I thought to myself that the door needed to be replaced. As I looked closer, I noticed that on the inside of the door at the bottom, there were many books perfectly placed, side-by-side, in similar fashion as they would be positioned on a shelf in a library.

In another dream, I was standing in a murderously bright white hospital, a fusillade of blinking whiteness, and in a specific room was an unspecified 3,000 year-old man, on his “death bed,” the final furrow. I was hovering around the room, as if like a guardian angel, floating/walking around the room and all about the hallways and spaces of the hospital, but all with no individuality of movement.

*

The eye/s in our dreams are like retinal circuses. Always the feeling of pre-sensations, pre-awareness, pre-knowingness--being told what is and what isn’t before coming to a conclusion, but running into them, truths, contradictions, a circular horizon, a feeling of unfeeling, but beyond feeling. The metaphor that “the body doesn’t do what the mind tells it to do” (this reference, often to an ageing body) is often what occurs in a dream, and at times vice-versa.

by Viktor Pivovarov

Senses and Nerve-endings

Victor Oliva, The Absinthe Drinker, 1890, Cafe' Slavia in Prague

Nothing to say, or avoiding inaccuracy? —Brancusi: “I am far from myself, I am no longer a part of my own person. I am within the essence of things themselves” —is what I think that some people think that I am thinking when Silence beats to its own drum, rather than beating around the bush, as if Silence took its little coins and left. Loyalty. My friend, L.M., says that I am quite the Loyalist, perhaps one of the most loyal persons he has ever known, and for this I am very thankful. Some subjects are too rosy to overlook, words just “slipping out,” but often times as deceiving as Appearance. Silence: an apple-core for your thoughts? And...?

Gass: “‘And’ is produced initially with an open mouth, the breath flowing out, but then that breath is driven up against the roof, toward the nose, even invading it before the sound is stoppered by the tongue against the teeth.” 

Pondering the Whiteness of a Wall, I think then of someone coming along and painting the wall, and then that bright white wall feels disguised; now, a mask of color, a masquerade of emptiness inside the mask with air-holes to breathe through, save for those that have been termite-inated, all within the inner ear of the wall. And the heartbeat of a home? Those that reside within the walls or the walls themselves? Technically speaking, the walls. Sentimentally, or perhaps living within walls of a home and “keeping it alive” takes at least one human being? An apartment has many hearts; the connection is like that of a gathering of nerves, a consistent beating (a lack of privacy?).  The Old goes on, without invention, indeed, the same heartbeat being carved by naturesque enveloping or the whiteness of walls. The whiteness of walls not strong enough to hold color? yet strong enough to weaken families?

Philip Whalen:  “A poem is a picture or graph of the mind moving” or: “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines”

I often feel shrouded in a mutilated layer of shadows, like undiscovered speech traveling through a drain-pipe. It sounds brutal, but the so-called “best parts” are hardly considered. WINTER, why are you not sporting what you regularly attract? Unseasonably mild winter, as if saying, “So long,” but it's all in the teaser, in the drain-pipe? (being silent is an active verb), and soon, how I long for a colder-than-normal winter season, where a sky and snow are all aglow in a self-generated winter light like some astral body, immobile in the broad scope of the gaping universe. Swoon of snow appearing like dreams behind the eyelids, maneuvers, sweepers appearing, frozen: inside and out; frosted glass in access parading across the visuals, across the brain, dazzling with its chilled vibrancy.

From THE FIFTH NEED OF A MAN, writes J.R. Platt (written in 1960):

The needs of man, if life is to survive, are usually said to be four: air, water, food, and, in the severe climates, protection. But it is becoming clear today that the human organism has another absolute necessity. It is one that has not been emphasized in the past, for we have not often been entirely deprived of it or compelled to appreciate the subtle and numerous ways in which it contributes to our well-being. This fifth need is the need for novelty—the need, throughout our waking life, for continuous variety in the external stimulation of our eyes, ears, organs, and all our nervous network. 

In a general way it has always been known that men need change. Put a man in a box and he goes crazy. But recent laboratory experiments on sensory deprivation has nevertheless been rather startling in their revelation of just how this happens.

Volunteers with softly bandaged heads and hands were put in isolation rooms or were floated in warm swimming pools were they could touch nothing and could only see dimness and hear only a low hum. It was not a vacation, as some might think! The men used for the experiments found they lost the sense of time, could not remember things or concentrate, had wild hallucinations, and finally, could never add or subtract. These were healthy, normal men, comfortable, and with no alcohol or drugs, yet they saw little yellow demons marching across the desert carrying enormous sacks. If the loudspeaker in the room finally asked a question or made a statement, it was the happiest of sounds. Yes, of course, two and two make seven, if the loudspeaker thought so. There was deeper truth in that, touching all philosophy.

After a few days of this every one of the man came staggering out, having thought about nothing they had planned to think about, unable to answer simple questions, and refusing to go back at any price. Stir crazy. And four hours after the bandages were removed, the walls seemed to weave in and out. Dreams were strange and it was days before perception and problem-solving returned to normal.

These experiments seem to prove, if proof is needed, that our bodies are not made to operate in a vacuum. Our brains organize, and exist in order to organize, a great variety of incoming sensory messages every waking second, and can become not only emotionally upset but seriously deranged if these messages cease or even if they cease to be new. The fifth need of man is the need for what can be called--in a mathematical sense—“information,” for a continuous, novel, unpredictable, nonredundant, and surprising flow of stimuli. I do not mean just a series of flickering lights or a madman’s chatter. This might be infinitely surprising but it would not interest us for long. Our sense impressions obviously must be organized into meaningful patterns if they are to bring us much information. But the most important pattern of all is the pattern of change.

In many ways the demand for novelty is like the demand for food. There can be a level of starvation and a level of gluttony. At the jail level, men wolf down their bread or soup, but they sometimes sacrifice even a little of that for a glimpse of the sky or a crumb of gossip. At higher and more normal levels of information flow, the need is relaxed and we can afford discrimination and rich creative enjoyment, becoming gourmets of mental fare. It is no accident that we speak of intellectual preferences as “taste.” And, as with food, we may also overload our networks with stimulation until we get mental bellyaches and can absorb no more.

But to call this a need for information—Is this not just dressing up the obvious in fashionable pedantry? Information theory, so-called, has been developed during the past decade from work in the mathematics of communication by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and others; and the term has taken on the technical overtones which it does not have in common usage. Yet even in this sense, information as Warren Weaver defines it, is “a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. . . . Thus greater freedom of choice, greater uncertainty, greater information go hand in hand.” The ideas of novelty and of intelligible information are bound up, and it is surprising what a bright light the motion of our need for them throws into many strange corners of human behavior. It brings out the nature of boredom, and of humor, of gambling and of learning, of our aesthetic judgments and of creative behavior in art and music, and of the driving force behind social revolutions.

Take aesthetic criticism. My colleague Professor Leonard Meyer of the Department of Music at the University of Chicago has recently a book entitled Emotion and Meaning in Music, in which he puts forward the theory that music or any other symbolic art may have two kinds of “meaning” for the hearer or the observer. One is its denotative meaning, where the music refers to some experience outside itself, either by obvious imitation or by accepted convention. The Domestic Symphony amuses us because of its household noises, and minor keys are thought to be poignant in the Western world because we sing sad songs to them. But formal music is dominated by an inherent meaning—that is, by a meaning which is a purely musical one; and this is what his theory is concerned with.

We all know that we can and do enjoy certain sequences of quite abstract sounds, patterns of pulsations of the air that are almost devoid of human content. What makes them enjoyable? Meyer says that when we listen to music “We are, in a sense, constantly expecting. Under certain conditions, we expect change, under others continuity, and under still others repetition; until finally, we expect the conclusion of the piece. Thus in a very general way expectation is always ahead of the music, creating a background of diffuse tension against which particularly delays articulate the affective curve and create meaning. Formal expectation is constantly active on several architectonic levels as a sort of generalized aesthetic tension which is shaped and particularized in the course of listening.”

Meyer suggests that the inherent musical meaning, the emotional as well as the intellectual satisfaction, lies just in this expectation and in the composer’s manipulation of our tensions, by turns subtly thwarted or subtly satisfied as the music develops.

The sense of freshness, apparently, with old and new objects? (as Coleridge once said).

Victory.

 by Rogelio Manzo

Beyond the Brocken spectre: thoughts, jots, dots.

 Ern Malley, by Sidney Nolan

I have learned, over plenty of useful and non-useful time (time is time is time, no?), that my uncle views certain images—particularly photographs—as How-did-the-artist-do-it? rather than as a “document” or “moment in time”—being it is what it is, the stoppage of time itself, like a fragment of a memory, or the fullest memory frozen in the mind, &c. My uncle is a brilliant, creative individual, of whom I admire in more ways than I could ever express, but it beckons to be expressed in more ways than a tongue could flap in the mouth during hot weather; for granted, he has always been a father-figure to me, a best friend. Dare I critique him? This is not of the sort, but a simple explanation of a Thought; an emotional kind of thing, where the matrix of my ponderance at this hour flows deeply, drifts far out into some humming mountain, the world’s caterer, a kind of Carpathian Mountains beauty (+ we began reading Dracula together during the Christmas holidays, all the way through chapter VI, so I must make it known, this connection to the Carpathian lands). This thought, mind you, should be thought of as nothing more than a statement, for the lack of a better term. My uncle has always had a knack for visually expressing himself, which stems back to his elementary school days. Upon seeing an abstract painting once, he said, “I thought of the painting as a sequence of ‘movements’,” and then a comment or two about the sounds of music, particularly space music, he states that he ‘sees things’ (like the idea of “hovering over a name”), in a sense akin to a lava lamp (thinking upon the rhine of surrealism—a mind so full of energy it seeps from the ears, the tongue full of silence, null and patient). As Baudelaire once reverberated: “The arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies”—! Emily Dickinson: “Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” My uncle and I jump around from subject to subject, even about sounds. He says, “We should write a book on Sound Theory.” Speaking in such thoughts as Cage’s theories, I add: “Each sound, no matter what it is, the loudest or the most minute, is a song in itself.”

I stumped my toe earlier and realized that it’s winter—unable to feel the pain is like being alive in a different body. Instilling something much brighter—it seems to never cease (James 1:8: “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”) “Blank, like a name left blank.”

Richard Wurmbrand On Atheism: In prison, the political officer asked me harshly, “How long will you continue to keep your stupid religion?” I said to him, “I have seen innumerable atheists regretting on their deathbeds that they have been godless; they called on Christ. Can you imagine that a Christian could regret, when death is near, that he has been a Christian and call on Marx or Lenin to rescue him from his faith?” The officer laughed, “A clever answer.” I continued, “When an engineer has built a bridge, the fact that a cat can pass over the bridge is no proof that the bridge is good. A train must pass over it to prove its strength. The fact that you can be an atheist when everything goes well does not prove the truth of atheism. It does not hold up in moments of great crisis.” I used Lenin’s books to prove to him that, even after becoming prime minister of the Soviet Union, Lenin himself prayed when things went wrong.

Rilke: “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”

Walking outside: that means that I’m literally           the weather”?
                                                                                            “under

Take pictures, love people. Take pictures, love people. Love people, take pictures. Love people, love people. Take pictures, take pictures. Films, films, films.

What I love about certain things is not about what they consist of, but instead what they are lacking.

A child crying because of strange weather? It’s like trying to ignore a giant.

George Stanley: “Writing — to see what turns up, or to keep going.” “Now the words tell of something so obvious / as to see the air in front of you / but not to have known it was something / to see.”

After reading Henri Michaux’s MISERABLE MIRACLE, the French poet/artist’s first book about his experimentation with Mescaline, a powerful hallucinogenic drug that has an “elongating propensity,” it’s easily one of more fascinating reads that I’ve ever encountered (right up there, with say, texts by Edmond Jabès—whether I disagree with some of them or not matters in the least). It’s a curious thought that, if the devastation of Michaux’s wife’s death after accidentally setting her nightgown on fire had not of happened, if his experimentation would have even began. Andre Gide said, “Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.” This rings true. Quotes like “a shiver in the workshop of the brain” describes it well, but one quote that sticks in mind is Michaux’s “language center” interacting with a knife that turns into a “thousand knives” and then:

Suddenly a thousand knives, suddenly a thousand dazzling scythes of light, scythes set in flashes of lightning, enormous, made to cut down whole forests, start furiously splitting space open from top to bottom with gigantic strokes, miraculously swift strokes, which I am forced to accompany internally...

Words become other words; colors like green are really red, and other colors by name aren’t their true identities, etc. “An enemy of colors? No longer colors at all. Yet they are not really absent either.” He describes certain visions as a “fussilade of colors.” Beautiful, makes me think of a blinking rainbow directly in front of your face. The mention of “whiteness” often is interesting too. One quote: “A whiteness appears, a whiteness to blind you, dazzling, like molten metal pouring out of a Bessemer converter.” Also: “Absolute white. White whiter than all whiteness. White of the advent of white.” White “riddling the eyeball.” Michaux writes also of being “hollowed out”—the “sensation of a fissure.” One quote that I found beautiful, “I hide my head in my scarf in order to know, to recognize my surroundings.”

Artistic, beautiful, poetic and comical (but that’s likely because I’m easily amused). 

I always feel like every photograph I make is like a film still, always leading to something else...

Some things are so beautiful that their presence alone could make me disappear from the face of the globe. One look, and slowly the invisible metamorphosis begins. Another look and I’m blinking out of view. One final look, and I’m the ‘real’ Invisible Man...

Solar plexus flaring up, as if on the wings of a meteor...

 Autoportrait au large con dégagé, by Ibrahim Shahda

Cropinua Sundiacti

painting by Pavel Tchelitchew

Fremder: “More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.”

Gaston Bachelard: “The poetic image exists apart from causality.” ‘…the increased intimacy of a house when it is besieged by winter’. . . Bachelard also says that “all corners are haunted.” Are there corners in nature? “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” (Rilke).

I have come to learn that there is a genuine truth in certain voices, whether it is someone speaking to you about a particular subject, or a stranger saying Hello, or someone singing a song from their heart, like Adele, but when someone doesn’t have a genuinity about them, it makes me curious as to their intent. Their walls are built before speaking; their voices are shattered by a lack of compassion; a voice becomes a mere sound, only a sound, habitual, to reflect their sense of hubris that makes me think of fungus growing from out of no where, in a strange place, and discovering that there had been a kind of secret depth in that place all-along, like unseen dew drops, mocking the naked eye. The initial unseen subject disguising, in a sense, what was to come, until the physical dimension revealed the invisible build-up. The invisible, eternal; the physical, temporal. From there, faith becomes profitable. Faith that most people are indeed full of love.

Aeschylus: “It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.”

Robert Kelly: “A word comes to mind. I write it down and see what happens. When you do this every day for 50 years, you learn how to wait.”

Are you warm? said the winter ground to the hibernating animals. No answer. No sound, except those of the crisp rustling leaves.

Stan Brakhage: “‘Polis is’ said Charles Olson, having found the archeological root of the word-end (thus beginning) of, say, ‘metropolis,’ etc. 'Police is a clear etymological derivative of ‘polis.’” ... The Police, then, are the public eyes; and they are, thus, expected to be Specialists of that ability-to-respond which most of the rest of the society has lost all Metro sense-of.” [Ha, too bad Stan didn’t live to see what's going on in this day-and-age.]

I read a quote wrong, and from that sprouted a new thing. I love it when this occurs. This is what came out of it: “I've bruised the carpet again,” but that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, “I’m bruising the walls,” but I realized that bruising the carpet sounded much better, since carpet is designed for pressing. The word “bruising” came out of skimming over “brushing” too quickly. Am I the only one who thinks of random questions? For instance, a question like the following came to mind just this morning: “After Francesca Woodman committed suicide, who took in her cat?” Her parents? A friend? Did the cat know--at the moment Francesca’s body pulverized the ground, death’s shadows surrounding the scene--that she had died that very moment? One would be surprised at what animals know; how, in some strange way, their emotions are attached to ours, like unending veins, nerves, brain stems. My uncle tells a story about his sister (my aunt, of course) who was living in Germany with her then husband who was stationed in Berlin back in the ’80s. Their dog wasn’t taken with them to Germany, so it was left for various family members to take care of while they were away. While my aunt was in the hospital, about to have the baby, my uncle said that one late night, as their dog stayed in his room that night (and most every night), he was awoken by the dog’s sudden, random howling. Turns out, the EXACT time that the dog started howling was when my aunt was giving birth in a hospital, some 4600 miles away.

The self, lost in selves, distracted,
leaving a piece of the Unreal You
with someone that sees the Real.

painting by Pavel Tchelitchew

Eduard Wiiralt, Heads, 1926

There are times when I am all over the place in my mind that I just can’t stay put for long, without being distracted by other thoughts that thrill me, thrilling me to the point of moving on from one beautiful thing to another. It’s as if at times I were transfigured, turning into a ricochet, and in the oneness of my body I remain as one, but in the vast openness of the expanding universe of my mind, I am in several different places at once.

Robert Louis Stevenson: “...any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.”

Conrad Aiken: “sharply we flower in this foul farewell”

In response to Gary Snyder's “How Poetry Comes To Me” (“It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night, it stays / Frightened outside the / Range of my campfire / I go to meet it at the / Edge of the light”), my own thoughts on How Photography Comes To Me:

It comes blundering over the horizon in shadowy angling, every possible light to trap, as if numbered like a limited edition. Some days, I go to it, and like a stumbling child attempting to walk, to mimic those enormous imposing adults, I find a new spark in the dark, slain again by the shutter-eye’s blink, as if to tease the scene, compressing it into time, like freshly compacted clay in the hands of the sculptor.

Cecil Taylor: “each note . . . a continent, a world in itself.”

Pound: “In the light of light is the virtù.”

*

A poem, a farewell, to a former love:

THE GREEN LAWN OF THE COURTHOUSE SQUARE

As our hands were shaking near raw
in mythological in-action as we held one another
on the bright green lawn of a courthouse square

in the cool, pouring rain (behind that mocking sky:
a big blue empty sea), we both knew
that we had been taken to the furthermost limits;

mutual separation was my heart’s near doom—
an atrocity of the dismemberment of my loins
that resembled scraps of metal across an

inflamed, asphyxiated landscape. Our anatomies
had already begun to pre-drown the earth with our
longings, like nature’s decay—not ignorant

of our names nor our human shapes—that signified
limpness in our precious limbs like broken trophies.
Some time, many days later, I re-visited that once

poignant locale—still as poignant as before—on the
green lawn of the courthouse square. I stood within
that enterprise where our bodies had been fastened,

soaking up the remnants, preserving what
still confirms a memory, as if like pressed leaves
upon my heart; our voices now like faint whispers

speaking underneath a wilted rose.

*

Poem:

     the slow transition
of you & me

O, Leak to my lips
into my lips

Sun like flaming corn
School buses to the groins
of the air
        Public school
systems
are like a McDonald’s
to the shin    stomach wanting
to cry again
much to the consumer's chagrin

FLESH     the old music
makes me want to weep
in a car
         riding with attendees
for betrayed blues
as if one were crying one’s eyes away
in a bar

those that dig for gold
that gold-dig without shame
that want me to talk with them
about their problems
for what gain?

*

Written after my cat obtained an eye injury, which broke my heart, entirely:

Weight comes, falls away from the body. What pains you like a combination of explosions in the belly, daubed nuclear, clear hearing of weeping at night, as joy comes in the morning. Faith daubs away darkness, Light peeling away the chaos without wry eye, joy feels like toys in the hands of children—furry kittens with dreams of capturing the sputtering fly. Innocence of animals like lightning put on alert, stops to behold the light within me that is brighter than the sun. I cannot question why I was reverse-engineeredby Yahweh—how my eyes of a once MISunderstanding were enlightened, were decoded with a precision of eye-lash thin seconds to accept the falling scales from my eyes, like corrective lenses covering me.(Good news: Cat's eye healed!)

*

The breath of the future is knowing that the next morning a bird will sing, as if birds open their mouths to inhale sunrays to get that much closer to God, the tender place of the chest within.

Or: Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky (Emily Dickinson).

From Curiosities of Literature (1807): “Why should we not erect an asylum for venerable genius, as we do for the brave and the helpless part of our citizens? It might be inscribed a Hospital for Incurables!”

Mark Storey: “No wonder Southey could laugh when, having written fifty stanzas about the forthcoming royal wedding, he heard that the engagement had been called off.”

Jack Spicer: “Let me chop apart / With my bare hands / This blurred forest.”

Sometimes cameras make me nervous. I feel overwhelmed, like an insect in a glass jar, frozen, expecting nothing. In photography, does a moment in time become an image, or is the image already there, dangling like a prize, to be taken? This should be a one sentence answer.  Maybe I should be playing a piccolo, everyone’s noses are like Pinnochio’s, no? Not everyone, but many. Gwendolyn MacEwen once wrote: “...for this cold impersonal dawn was for me another kind of darkness, a new and secret form of night.” There's something quite poetic about hearing a train off in the distance, particularly during the night hours. It’s like audible film-noir, leaving a mental fragrance.

Eduard Wiiralt, ca. 1926–34, from the private collection of Juhani Komulainen,
part of a 2009 exhibit

 

  

Fragments & Buxus

 

HIM, Fred Tomaselli

W.H. Auden: “words have no words for words that are not true.” 

E. Jabes: “In the middle of words is the void through which they escape.”  

How painful my heart ticks itself through every desolate road I’ve crossed. Heart, you beat through my chest with the esteem of a locomotive.  

The word for “spirit” in Hebrew is the same as the word “wind.” Lovely. 

I always imagine myself in various places, in various periods of time, in various weather patterns, and just the other evening I imagined myself at night filling a water gun full of honey and aiming it towards the moon, already yellow on the horizon (“a yellow skull”). An overwrought imagination as if from the Middle Ages. A ghost that complains of being unburied. Mozart plucking prayers from the air, sculpting them into unquiet constructions. A reason to feel human: textures of twists, silent potency, balderdash—a midcentury shape of a large scale; “the secret of modern life fore-shadowed” (Gautier) or the opposite in essence: the way “Lady of Shalott” was “half-sick of shadows”—cataracts counter-acted, running down the cheeks of the once blind woman. Re-birth’d; no sound, no screaming. A new birth where I’m born into fabric on a Nympheus print or Melilla in indigo blue and silvery gold texture. Feeling out-of-place, abnormal “in a vintage sort of way” or like a tiger shark let loose in a swimming pool full of party-seals. What, say, is easier on the eyes than keeping them closed? 

I must be in the silent minority. No effete snobs or superlicious sophisticates here! I admit to viewing “House Wives of Orange County” for a brief (painful) spell—felt like watching a Kodak commercial—felt like soaking one’s hands in dirty dish water: all of these little men running around in gray golfing attire with perky, big-breasted (silicone?) wives doing the Electric Slide through their extravagant kitchens with overly-cozy connotations. Ah, a silent minority, like winter’s white-plaster mirror; “what artists call a French gray.” A French gray eats away the evening, like serving spareribs to a pack of wolves; monstrous like disappointed husbands and wives. 

There is no such as “nothingness” (outside of space/universe, granted, for the Universe, collectively, is a Something. Our minds, like the universe, expanding). Nothingness derives from man-made philosophies. Everything is a Something. Perhaps it is simply that doubt, fear, etc. gives a means for the “idea” of nothingness? like the atheist that feels that life has little meaning and zero value? or, the idea that we are merely existing only “in the now” “in the present” and that human beings are mere flesh and bones and that, ultimately, we are to simply perish as our Complete Finality? If be the case, however, then the purpose of life is essentially insignificant and we are simply ‘being’ as, well, Beings. There are quite a-many in various communities that would have believe that the earth and humanity are the result of time, chance and energy. This, of course, means that God does not exist as a personal, infinite being. This also means that nothing is significant or absolute. If this were true, there would be no meaning to life! There would instead be only accidental mechanical functions. We were not accidents of “physical laws” but instead we were created.

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A poem: 

Squeeze the shadow—let it crouch near you.
We’re all just moving pictures passing along;
perhaps the way a child looks at a ferris wheel.
I'm a water-colored merry-go-round: my ribs,
the nexus of another breath. 

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It’s safe to say that Sherlock Holmes was never trained to be an observant and thorough as he is—never trained to find needles in haystacks, for seemingly, Sherlock Holmes is the haystack! He simply picks ‘n’ chooses as they come, at ease; what better way to attack the developments than to observe the unordinary in the ordinary and vice-versa? 

Knut Hamsun: “. . . truth telling is unselfish inwardness.” All of these people tell you what people are ‘not’ rather than informing you what they ‘are’ or can ‘become.’ “So tall and quiet like a king.” 

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Interesting ditty here:

 

“If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, ‘Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house—for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.’ It would be still more absurd to say this if I had the bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because the defect of the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not—despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t do—for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home with a (reliable!) army.”

--from “Western philosophy: an anthology” by John Cottingham. 

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Oh, darling, you're such a lamb.” “Hello, sweet duchess.” One often confuses the life of a man with his art. Everyone seems to look alike when you don’t know them. You can never tell what private tragedies people have experienced, but when people start throwing salt over their left shoulder, I have to start wondering.

No inanimate object can have a personality, so is said; but, we look at a house and say that it's cheerful, gloomy, melancholy, &c. but what we're really doing is simply describing our own reactions. The human mind has been compared to the atom bomb, whose two elements, when kept apart, are perfectly harmless. So it is with the human mind.

Interesting to note that Stamps use a blend of corn dextrin (gummy substance extracted from starch) and water. It is designed to last longer on commemorative stamps. On “regular stamps” however a blend of polyvinyl acetate emulsion and dextrin are used—also added: a bit of propylene glycol, used to reduce paper curl. Interestingly, polyvinyl acetate used for stamp adhesive is the basic ingredient for bubble gum. Brilliant.  

Reb Alsem: “We live out the dream of creation, which is God’s dream. In the evening our own dreams snuggle down into it like sparrows in their nest.”

Reb Hames: “Birds of night, my dreams, explore the immense dream of the sleeping universe.”

Reb Hames: “Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time.” 

Is it true that every woman wants to be seen in that “certain light”? Why are “manly pursuits” misconceptioned as hunting, gambling and electronic-tinged? Does Kitty Bennet really swoon at the color red? What of Henry Miller’s “Rousseaustic withdrawel from the American Dream” which he referred to as “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”? Do newspapers really lie? Radios? Are the streets the only thing that “howls with truth”? Why did everyone go gaga over military men in Jane Austen’s books? What are you willing to admit? Can a mind ‘room’ anywhere in blue? Are you eating dinners based on the colors of famous sports teams? Would you write about Majorca if you lived close-by? Do you have a small chair-fetish? Are you a moment event beyond muted punch? Is minimalism a flat elevation of charity? Wipe your hands on your pants? Your minimal hands? Your pants, dirty in light? Does light . . . overwhelm itself? Does light . . . shed tears over photographic Dark Rooms? Does the hefty circle of a bird’s eye make you think of Quaker-calm? Does are you what of? 

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Corita Kent: “Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries.” 

The awkward silence irritated him (me?), but somehow glittered in his chest (mine?); a fever that expressed itself like wordlessness of paintings.  “Bone-tired.” The mirror looking back at me; what do I reflect? Perhaps it seems me jumping from place-to-place like an Egyptian jerboa? I have realized that it would see happiness in my external composition. Indeed. The basic difficulty with certain people is that they don’t know how to cultivate their happiness. Happiness is a habit. It’s freedom! And I feel more free than a feminist raving about short hair; how long hair symbolizes, according to some, “a delicate Alice-in-Wonderland thing that undercuts the image of a strong human being.” How silly. Peace of mind! I wear it well. If one pierces “Mystery” all that flies suddenly, momentarily, becomes airless craters. Mystery possesses the unique ability to heal its wounds. There are times at night I feel swept away from the world—from all of the anger and forced liberation and disease and war and revolutionary irrationalists. There are instances, however, during the day when I am a “passion flower”; a “scarlet runner”; bright “forsythia” and “yellow jasmine.” The world, crumbling, falling like dolmens, and it seems as though animals are, at times, daydreaming about a way to escape the man-made machinery; they look directly through us while the strokes of the clock writhes into the next “second.” 

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“The evil that men does lives after them,

The good is oft interred in their bones.”

--Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR

ACT III, SCENE 2, LL. 80-81

Distance, the greatest place to center oneself? “The ladder urges us beyond ourselves. Hence its importance. But in a void, where do we place it?” Answer: Beyond ourselves. Perhaps it is true that we must “wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.” Doxa? Have you really wondered why Mickey Mouse has four fingers? For a very good reason, I should say! It is like “the creation of another imagination”—sound without borders.(Damasio: “The body-minded brain.”) . . .

An image biting to see the patterns; this is both organized words—they reflect between gardens as company. Center, frisked like a bomb. I is auditorium; the pandemonium at the podium in the great heart’s flurry. I, He, of hints? Is He this sea-invented pun? I created a slow-motion for my shadow to witness it lag behind in empathy. Gradually, light shattered it back up-to-speed. 

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko (one of Russia’s most beloved poets) once said: “In Russia a poet is more than a poet.” Well, in America a poet is an Incomplete Completion. Poets with voices in the sky; a yielded wealth “could literally be walked on”—no poet is every truly “underground.” Poets only go “underground” when buried. A “grave” condition? What are these words on a journalistic-“blog” but a shipwrecked Sub-Zero? Underwater baptism of text; this page, this paragraph, like an ocean of bluestone; poems marbled to the ocean floor. Look for gold at the bottom; you will only discover . . . words . . . words in wont . . . or an opened book; unfinished yet “finished”; decrepit at first glance from the foamy surf, but onward it rises and rises for the jewel of reaching where Identity eludes us. A voice. You lose it to a whisper, like a ship sailing pas a well-lit lighthouse; a voice heard in a seagull’s throat. Listen. We are drained into the seas; dark are their maps. The seas inhale, laugh outloud at Man’s attempts to reach the bottom of the deepest summits. If I were poems, you would sink into every word like a speculation. Parallel’d hexagrams glisten with foreknowledge. I swell in the winds of your every breath.  

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from “Lavish Absence”: “In ‘Mirror and Scarf,’ one of my favorite chapters in The Book of Yukel, the closeness of sound in the two title words, miroir and mouchoir, sparks a breathtaking meditation on the face as reflection rather than flesh. In English, it is less convincing that “Mardohai Simhon claimed the scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror” until, at Simhon’s death, a large scar is discovered under the scarf. Reflection always comes back to a wound. It both has its origin, in a wound and circles it’s like a scarf-mirror.”

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Kathe Kollwitz self portrait (1898) reminds me of This.  

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Reb Alphandery: “Our dreams extend us.”  Are we, therefore, extended by the remembrance of a dream? or, are we extended every time that we wake from sleep? I suppose Sleep, itself, is a kind of extension; a necessary extension, just as the electrolytes in our foods are necessary extensions for keeping our hearts beating.  

Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is beyond brilliant, like the hyper-metamorphosis of a blister beetle. 

About the deerfly: “all species are annoying to man.”  

Film about Francesca Woodman Here.  
 

Looking at photos looking back at me thinking that photos think that I, too, am a photo. Photographs are wrinkles in time. When our eyes look upon them, we smooth out their wrinkles. Separating the infinite from. As with material objects, lusts, etc. being one’s “god,” I suppose Edmond Jabes’s “god” was The Book, or books in general perhaps. A shutter-cap widens the camera’s eye. Man created the camera’s eye. God created man’s eye.  

The other evening, while my stomach’s geography rumbled like a thousand bison over the land, with limited I strolled into a local dollar store to purchase a bottle of Acetaminophen. I looked around for a moment, noticing as always that another holiday had come early, forced onto civilization; commercialism’s angry beast snarling and drooling at the mouth. Easter quickly approaching—“I wonder if I could locate candy for fifty cents?”—A young blonde no more than twenty looked at me twice, greeted me, as she unraveled floral flowers from boxes. I walked down an aisle looking for the medicine section, as so, drifting past a man talking on a cell phone who I heard say as I walked by: “So the flu actually comes from a bug?” I proceeded to search out the proper aisle, hearing friction between a Guardian and a mentally-challenged child, confining myself to the poignant cries. A petite red-headed woman smiled at me, only glazing over my aura briefly, obviously too engrossed to shop or think of the lovely conversation she had perhaps recently had which scuttled her balloon, as if perhaps patching up a relationship before it hit rock-bottom; for, granted, who dare deserves to be sent to be without supper? Cryptic possibilities have always laminated my mental epilogue; my undissolvable interest in stretching the tendon of every moment, edifying my curiosities, steeped in near absolution. 

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A poem I wrote recently: 

As spring peeks out its blossomed snout

   And winters goes dashing about,

The warmth above unfreezes the doves

   And the flowers erupt in a shout!



If I want a house warming gift, I’ll just let the windows up in the dog-days of summer. 

The best part of waking up . . . is breath in my lungs.   

Field Guides, Fred Tomaselli  

(photo collage, gouache, acrylic, and resin on wood)